With The Chants (in All, Comprised Of Joe Ankrah, Eddie Ankrah, Edmund Amoo, Nat Smeda, And Alan Harding)

How to write a historical novel

I recently read two books which could be handily placed on opposing sides of the ‘how to write historical fiction’ spectrum. They are The Map of Love by Adhaf Soueif and Brooklyn by Colm Toibín. One takes in the entire modern history of a particular country through the experiences of its characters, the other’s scope is limited to the point of provinicial. Yet, it is the small story, Toibín’s Brooklyn, that is infinitely more successful. Souief said of her leading male character, Sharif al-Baroudi, that she wanted to write a character one could fall in love with, using the appearance of a romantic hero in Egyptian cinema as her template. The story of the Map of Love is split across the 20th century, focusing on the romance and marriage between Lady Anna Winterbourne and al-Baroudi in Egypt in the 1900s and the discovery of her diaries by two of her female descendents, American Isabel and Egyptian Amal. Soueif had an admirable aim in the book – to tell the little-known story of the nascent Egyptian struggle for independence in the years before the First World War – and while the research is comprehensive and the historical details are fascinating, the characters utterly fail to convince, in my opinion. Lady Anna is too modern a woman to be believable as a character of her time, and her unquestioning, wholehearted adoption of her new husband’s family, culture and country come across as forced rather than romantic. From a secure position within conventional Victorian genteel society, she abruptly and without question pledges uncritical support for the cause of Egyptian independence. Even though she is portrayed as more thoughtful and historically aware than her peers, her decision just doesn’t feel believable. History shows us that the need for independence in former colonies was justified, but it seems implausible that someone like Lady Anna would take that position so quickly and easily in her place and time. The story isn’t helped by the fact that Lady Anna and her husband are too saintly to be true – apart from some minor cultural speedbumps they remain sickeningly in love, without any of the normal gripes and confusions that accompany even the happiest of marriages, let alone one across a cultural gulf. The two are like a cardboard cut-out couple, cloyingly devoted to each other and to the cause of independence with barely a question asked or a dissenting voice raised, and they are also implausibly modern in their attitudes to each other. Perhaps if they were not presented to the reader in the form of Anna’s diary entries a more convincing inner life might have arisen, but as it stands they don’t convince and it is hard to care about them. The modern Egyptian, Amal al-Ghamrawi, is more rounded, but again her edges seem to have been neatly rounded off to leave a character who, despite all her soul-searching, seems somewhat hollow. The main problem with The Map of Love is that the characters seem to have been designed to represent particular things and so perform a kind of wish-fulfilment for the author. Lady Anna is the contrite face of colonial Britain turning her back on her old life to embrace that of the people her nation is oppressing, Sharif al-Baroudi is an unusually enlightened 19th century man who disavows gender stereotypes and political violence and Amal’s brother Omar lives a successful, cosmopolitan life but remains loyal to his ethnic background. It is always obvious to the reader when a writer is using characters as a mouthpiece, and immediately interferes with any spontaneous enjoyment of the text. The Map of Love aims nobly to tell the story of modern Egypt, and does succeed to some extent, but it ultimately fails due to the lack of believable characters. Brooklyn, on the other hand, appears to be telling nothing more than the story of one unremarkable young woman, from an unremarkable town in Ireland, and her emigration to America. Eilis Lacey, the woman in question, is not even moving to New York as we know it from movies – the American sections of the book centre around a few streets of the Irish-American district of Brooklyn with its large Irish community, complete with an omnipresent parish priest. But prosaic though Eilis’ life and experiences may be, her inner world and small conflicts are rendered so thoughtfully and reverentially by Toibín they end up telling a larger story – that of the Irish emigrant experience. Eilis has never expected more than a life in Enniscorthy, working in an office until someone marries her and she devotes life to having his children, but events conspire to send her abroad to work in a department store and study bookkeeping. Initially Brooklyn is not much more exciting than Enniscorthy – Eilis lives in a Irish-run boarding house with a curfew, her days are spent wearily trekking across the shop floor and her free time taken up by evening classes and helping the priest with parish activities. But as time goes by the opportunities American life begin to open themselves up – from exposure to people of different races and cultures, to the excitement of the latest fashions. Toibín is a compassionate author who doesn’t sneer at the joy ordinary people find in ordinary things - in fact he accords these things the respect they deserve. Eilis even finds romance in America, but the slow tugs of obligation from the two sides of her life threaten to undo her when circumstances require to return home to Ireland. The premise of Brooklyn is the choice Eilis must take between her two worlds, and interestingly this choice is not presented as a clichéd split between home, obligation and repression and abroad, freedom and experimentation. On the contrary, Eilis faces potential nooses wherever she looks, and the ties that bind can take unexpected forms. Her mixture of engagement and passivity are wholly convincing as the experiences of an individual, yet also seem to encompass the thoughts and feelings of a whole generation that were put in her position. This novel has no overawed glimpses of the Manhattan skyline for the arriving immigrant, but a collection of moments – a parish hall dance, a trip to a bookshop, a day out in Coney island – to give us a truly authentic sense of the migrant experience. Brooklyn has been as carefully worked and polished as The Map of Love - the difference is the joins are not visible and the author has all but disappeared, and that is why it is the more successful work.

This line is so funny. Soccer mom that just gave herself a pelvic injury by doing crescent lunge pose too enthusiastically.

Review of an early Hilary Mantel

Goodreads review of 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street', an early novel by Hilary Mantel:

A terrific sense of menace pervades this story from the beginning, as cartographer Frances struggles to navigate her new home in Jeddah, where her husband has landed a lucrative construction job.

It's the mid-1980s, and Saudi Arabia is riding high on the back of oil wealth, marble and glass towers rising out of empty lots, a modern-looking yet feudal economy carried on the backs of exploited immigrant workers. Cloistered in a luxurious apartment, Frances is frustrated by her Muslim women neighbour's refusal to accept Frances' assertions that life is better for women in the West. It's cautionary tale in how a superior attitude will only drive others further into their own convictions.

Frances recognises her essential prejudice against Saudis and Muslims in general, but the crushing imprisonment and police state-like surveillance of the society she's living in break what little will she has to separate her legitimate protests from bigotry. The novel presents expat life satirically, showing the other English people living in Saudi as essentially venal and bigoted, staying the country just long enough to save up for a 'city flat' in London. Expat life hasn't changed much in 30 years, it seems. Corrupt, arrogrant Saudi politicians and minor royals are equally skewered. The novel's main flaw is the lack of resolution in the central mystery, a story that is built up, clue by clue, through the whole story. Perhaps the details are unimportant and that aspect of the plot merely functions to illustrate Frances' growing paranoia, but what little details that emerged were interesting enough to warrant further explanation. The powerful sense of dread ended up feeling anticlimactic. Also, Frances herself was somewhat thinly drawn, considering she was the central character - her neighbours and the other expats came much more vividly to life. Some experiments in structure didn't really work for me either.

Overall, worth reading, if only as a warning against falling into the trap of becoming the eternal expat, staying in the hated host country for “just another year”....

THE BEATLES at a hotel in Weston Super Mare, Somerset, by Bruce Leak, an 11 year old boy who was on a family holiday with his parents and sister. 1963.

'Wherever you go, there you are'

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Another regular conversational pit stop during our calls was the guests I was interviewing on my radio show on any given week, especially if they were rock stars. Inevitably, John would have some spirited opinions to share about his competition. One time, for instance, I casually mentioned an upcoming booking with Mick Jagger.

“Why are you interviewing him?” John asked.

The truth was, I was interviewing Jagger because he was holding a concert in L.A. to raise money for victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua. (His wife, Bianca, was Nicaraguan.) But for some reason I foolishly blurted out, “Because the Rolling Stones are probably the greatest live touring band in the world.”

“Isn’t that what they used to say about us?” John coolly replied.

“But the Beatles aren’t touring anymore,” I said, stepping on a landmine. “The Beatles as a group don’t exist anymore. And the Rolling Stones are as important a presence as anybody in rock ’n’ roll.”

“The Rolling Stones followed us!” John shouted. “Just look at the albums! Their Satanic gobbledygook came right after Sgt. Pepper. We were there first. The only difference is that we got labeled as the mop tops and they were put out there as revolutionaries. Look, Ellie,” he went on, “I spent a lot of time with Mick. We palled around in London. We go way back. But the Beatles were the revolutionaries, not the Rolling Pebbles!”

Excerpt From, ‘We All Shine On’, Elliot Mintz

I hateeeee that we are stuck with Ian Leslie as an alternative voice to the mainstream Lennon/McCartney narrative. I don't want to rely on this man, and he possibly has the means to really shift the narrative/affect beatle literature/media. Our society depends on the perspectives of men (fuck this, but it is true unfortunately), particularly white men, especially on topics as mainstream and "male dominated" (absolute bullshit) as the Beatles. Like, we can't even get a queer white man on this!! What the fuck? That man has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to the absolute queer shit storm that is Lennon/McCartney.

Builders of the future

‘Behind every great fortune is a great crime’. The old saying, traditionally attributed to Balzac, is as striking today as ever. In fact, in today’s atmosphere, it rings even more true. We may admire the wealthy, the powerful, the self-made, but deep down we can’t help but believe that a millionaire must be, if not quite a criminal, than at least criminally exploitative. It’s this assumption that fires the script of The Social Network, a movie about the events that led to the founding of Facebook and the gazillion-dollar lawsuits that followed. Mark Zuckerberg, the driving force behind the site, is the world’s youngest billionaire, and it is The Social Network‘s aim to uncover the crime(s) that led to those billions.

Based on the book The Accidental Billionaires, the movie portrays Zuckerberg as a Harvard-attending socially inept weirdo whose immense sense of entitlement causes him to react furiously to a girl’s rejection. After calling her a ‘bitch’ on his blog, he creates (with the help of his geeky roommates) a site called FaceMash that calls up random pairs of photos of female Harvard students with a ‘hot or not?’ button underneath. The site is an instant hit, and Zuckerberg is courted by uber-WASP twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss to help them build a Harvard dating site. Zuckerberg agrees, but after stringing them along for a few weeks, creates a more sophisticated version of the idea – the Harvard-based prototype for Facebook. The twins are furious and make the (frankly rather dubious) claim that he ‘stole their idea’. Meanwhile The Facebook (as it’s originally called) takes off like wildfire. Zuckerberg refuses to let co-founder Eduardo Saverin bring in advertising for the site, and on the encouragement of Napster founder Sean Parker, moves the operation to California. He freezes Eduardo out of the business altogether, leading to the second lawsuit that frames the story.

The plot is pacily executed, with the Winklevoss and Saverin trials against Zuckerberg used as a framing device. As the characters remember events the action jumps back in time and the story unfolds. There’s a lot of the kind of ‘lightbulb’ moments so beloved of film-makers trying to evoke a creative process, complete with shots of Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg dashing across Harvard towards the nearest computer to encode his latest revelation. Some of these revelations seem simplistic, but Zuckerberg’s assertion that Facebook is a viable idea because ‘anyone can look at pictures of hot girls on the internet – what they want is to look at pictures of people they know’ is bang on the money and exactly the reason Facebook took off in the way it did. What doesn’t ring true is the script’s constant assertions that Zuckerberg’s primary motivation in setting up the site was to impress girls and increase his social standing in Harvard, with its rigid hierarchies and elite clubs.  The real Zuckerberg hasn’t said much about the film, but he did comment recently that he particularly disagreed with the script’s interpretation of his motives. As he put it: “They [the film's creators] just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things”.

I believe that that is the film’s key weakness. Plenty of people are motivated by emotional damage, but the current idea seems to be that any great acheivement must be underpinned by some terrible lack within the achiever. It’s almost as though the modern world is suspicious of anyone who achieves ‘too’ much, who uses their gifts to their absolute limit and attempts to be the best they can be. Single-mindedness is seen to be the same as destructive obsession, pride in doing well at something is seen as being interchangeable with grasping ambition. After efforts are made to understand those who do things for the wrong reasons, a dangerous assumption seems to be rising in storytelling that implies that no-one ever does anything just for the sake of it. This ties in well with an era in which university courses are rated only on their ‘practicality’, and hobbies are something to enhance a CV with. If you’re not emotionally damaged, you’re nakedly seeking profit; either way, high achievement is suspect.

I don’t know if Mark Zuckerberg is a nice person or not; certainly you don’t get to his position without a tough hide and a willingness to make enemies. What he undoubtedly is is a programming genius and a hard worker. Is he emotionally damaged? He could be, who knows? Whether he is or not, it’s not the reason he invented (or co-invented, depending on who you talk to) Facebook. His statement that he built it because he ‘likes building things’ is the simplest, and therefore most plausible explanation. All over the world, people are creating, inventing, building, designing and investigating all manner of things simply because they are interested in them. People are working day and night, going without food and sleep, not because they are damaged, but because they passionately care about what they do and want to do to the best of their ability.

Most of us are average in our skills and our abilities, and undoubtedly that leads to an easier, more balanced life. But we shouldn’t pathologise geniuses and grafters; they are the ones who take the ‘giant leaps’ that help us all walk faster. Facebook has its good and bad sides, but it can’t be denied that it has changed the world. Even if Zuckerberg is as unpleasant and odd as The Social Network suggests, that’s not relevant to his role as one of its creators.